Recipe creators accuse Google of using AI to lift content without attribution

Adam and Joanne Gallagher run Inspired Taste, a recipe site they’ve been growing for the past 15 years. Last week, they posted a short video on X that’s now getting a lot of attention.

They typed their own “chicken and dumplings” recipe into Google, and instead of the usual list of links, the top result was a complete AI-written recipe that read almost exactly like theirs: same ingredient amounts, same cooking times, even the same little tips about dropping the dumplings with a spoon.

This needs to stop! cc @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/tevWuS0eVe

— Inspired Taste (@inspiredtaste) December 2, 2025

As expected, they weren’t happy. “This needs to stop,” they wrote. Search expert Barry Schwartz reposted the clip with a blunt “This is just not right Google :(” and the replies filled up fast with other bloggers saying the same thing is happening to them.

It’s not the first time Google has been called out for this. A few days earlier, the NotebookLM team put up an AI-generated infographic for a Thanksgiving stuffing recipe.

Food blogger Jessica Merchant from HowSweetEats noticed it was basically her recipe, copied word for word, and turned into a pretty graphic. Someone pointed it out publicly, and Google quietly deleted the post.

The bigger worry for creators is traffic. When Google hands over the full recipe on the search page, most people never click through to the original blog. Years of testing, photographing, and writing suddenly earn nothing.

One commenter under a post by Lily Ray, also highlighting the incident, said, “You know it’s bad when we’re quite literally begging for Google to reference our work. The health of the ecosystem is quite literally in Google’s hands right now. And frankly, I don’t trust their short-term thinking to guide the transition.”

This fits right into the larger mess Google Search is facing, where AI features like these are accused of stealing clicks and tanking small sites — as laid out in a deep dive on our sister site last year.

Google hasn’t commented on either incident. Meanwhile, the company keeps rolling out new AI features. The latest is a right-click “AI mode” in Chrome that can summarize any webpage or answer questions about it on the spot, as noted Saadh Jawwadh on X, who shared a screenshot.

Useful for users, sure, but another way for content to get pulled apart and served up without sending anyone to the source.

For now, recipe writers are left trying to figure out the next move: paywalls, memberships, TikTok, newsletters — anything that doesn’t rely on Google sending visitors. The feeling on X is that the old bargain (create good stuff, Google sends traffic) is breaking down, and a lot of independent sites are going to feel the pain first.

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